The whole reason I wrote Drink This was to help. So when I heard from a reader today about his Drink This triumph it made my day. The size and shape of the triumph was this: This reader went into a very classy, comprehensive, overwhelming liquor store and scored a bottle of wine he loved without feeling confused, intimidated, and possibly suckered. “Here’s what I did,” he told me. “I wrote down a list of names from the Pinot Noir chapter, marched in there, and found one of them. Obviously there’s teaching yourself stuff, but sometimes you just want a name on a piece of paper.” The bottle of wine he scored was the basic Argyle Pinot Noir “It was a $26 bottle of wine, which is a little more than I would ordinarily be comfortable buying, but it was such a great feeling to walk out of the chaos like: I can now look at a row of meaningless shapes and colors and get some help! Instead of walking out of the wine store like, oh, did I just totally f myself.” And he loved the wine.
Some weeks you feel like you do nothing right, and some weeks you hear something like this and it all feels all right.

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I love to periodically check out the dust-dry wine industry site Wine & Spirits Daily, because it’s full of all sorts of yummy ultra-dry nuggets of data, it’s like a Norwegian crisp-bread for a wine-writer’s mind. Dry nuggets like that wine sales are up 2.6% in 2009, the increase is driven entirely by wines under $15, and the biggest gainers are under $15 wines from California, Washington, Argentina, and New Zealand.

None of that is too unexpected, but the yummy dry nugget that just about knocked me out of my chair today was from Danny Brager, a VP at Nielsen, the trend-tracking-and-ratings company. Brager was explaining that there’s a general lack of consumer confidence, summarized WSD, “When consumers lack confidence, they tend to shy away from out-of-home entertainment. Increased ratings for the Food Network, higher cookbook sales (+9%) and increased traffic at food sites (+11%) show that consumers are cooking more at home.” Okay, yes, interesting. “All this has created a ‘new normal’ focused at home,” concludes Brager.

Yes, it was just reported as simple fact that in the recent past, “normal” was not at home — yet now it is.

Okie dokie, folks, that’s why I moved to the Midwest. I like me some common sense and good values. Um, dear wine-industry, home has always been normal. It was the old normal, it’s certainly it’s the new normal, and y’all need to stop working every night and visit yours. Home!

Home. Seriously. Home is the new normal. And thus concludes the frothy-credit of the 2000’s.

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